I’m your fire, at your desire
Image: Nintendo Life Ahoy folks, and welcome back to another edition of Box Art Brawl!
Last time, we looked at the Wii classic Okami in light of the recent sequel announcement from The Game Awards (woohoo!). Honestly, it wasn’t a particularly close battle: Japan, with its beautiful use of colour and composition, won the day with 74% of the vote, leaving North America/Europe with the remaining 26%.
This week, we’re going back even further to the days of the SNES with the delightful Breath of Fire II. Originally released in 1994 by Capcom, it’s since been launched on the GBA, the Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U, and 3DS, and of course, Nintendo Switch Online.
It’s another duel this week with North America and Europe joining forces against Japan. So enough waffling, let’s get to it.
Be sure to cast your votes in the poll below; but first, let’s check out the box art designs themselves.
Europe / North America
Image: Capcom / Launchbox
We love the use of colour with both regional variants here, and the Western design leans heavily into the use of shadow with its cast of characters; it’s cool. That said, the change in art style results in a loss of some of the personality from the original Japanese design. It’s not a bad look, by any means, but we imagine its success this week will very much depend on your personal taste.
Japan
Image: Capcom / Launchbox
The colours here are a bit cooler than the Western variant, overall, but there’s a good mix in there too. The deep red of the dragon, the flashes of yellow and green in the characters’ outfits; it’s nice! It does suffer from something that movie posters do a lot these days in that it just shoves a bunch of characters onto the piece with no rhyme or reason, but we have to admit that it does work reasonably well here.
Thanks for voting! We’ll see you next time for another round of Box Art Brawl.
Nintendo Life’s resident horror fanatic, when he’s not knee-deep in Resident Evil and Silent Hill lore, Ollie likes to dive into a good horror book while nursing a lovely cup of tea. He also enjoys long walks and listens to everything from TOOL to Chuck Berry.
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